It was my birthday last week (don’t ask which one), and now it’s time to put the birthday cards into the box for recycling. How many millions of cards follow the same route every day without a thought?

However, there’s one card that I just couldn’t throw out – not just because it came from my wife – but because of where it came from. The text on the back of the card tells part of the story:

This hand crafted product has been made in Bangladesh where skilled craftspeople have been producing fine applique and embroidery for centuries

We met some of the producers at Swajan last year in Dhaka, and saw how these cards make all the difference financially to the producers. Suddenly a birthday card becomes more than just a piece of ‘post-consumer waste’, but a link between two different worlds. Once people make this link, Fair Trade isn’t just a trendy trade mark – it’s a way of using consumer power to help balance the manifest inequalities of the world trading system which underpins the life styles we enjoy in the western world.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 7:04 pm and is filed under Fairtrade. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.